Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
Sometimes, there’s beauty in disorder—take “Mess,” the new one-off from Los Angeles songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sasami Ashworth, aka SASAMI. The single arrives a year and change after her self-titled debut album—which we praised as one of 2019’s best albums (so far) last summer, later hailing SASAMI as one of the year’s best new artists—and it serves as a stellar final page of SASAMI’s story.
“I started making my self-titled album almost three years ago. Since then I’ve fucked other people, healed bad relationships, broken new good ones, found more joy, more anger and everything in between,” says Ashworth in a statement. “Mess is where I’m at now. I wanted to end the year of my first album campaign with one last sentence before I crack into the stone slab of my next album. This time I didn’t want to provide any visual counterparts. I just want people to listen.”
Our pleasure: “Mess” locks into a nervy groove instantaneously, intertwining an acoustic riff with shuffling drums and only deviating from that lockstep to perfectly punctuate Ashworth’s fleeting moments of optimism. “I looked at a sign today / It told me that I could be saved / I’m just tryin’ to get paid / and I’m already high now,” she sings, repeating the last line as controlled-chaos guitar noise swallows her voice. Between Ashworth’s unvarnished honesty and fuzzed-out six-string nirvana, “Mess” has us counting the days until the start of SASAMI’s next chapter.
It’s hard to be certain of any event scheduling in these times of coronavirus, but for now, SASAMI is set to play Lodge Room in Los Angeles on March 28, The Wild Honey Pie’s Welcome Campers festival in May and Virgin Fest in June. Tickets are here.
Watch the “Mess” lyric video and SASAMI’s 2018 Paste Studio session below. You’ll find her tour dates further down.
SASAMI Tour Dates:
March
28 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ Lodge Room
May
23-25 – Camp Lenox, Mass. @ Welcome Campers Festival
June
06-07 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ Virgin Fest